Month: December 2023

It was properly cold today – a real december day. I was wearing 4 layers this morning and it was still getting to me. There was a beautiful white ice on the cars, atmospheric freezing fog and a crazy Rad cycling along in the morning sun It really feels like christmas is coming, I had christmas hot chocolate in macdonalds, a christmas burger in whetherspoons and christmas chocolate from Tesco.

After living the highlife like that, we went out for a walk. But it wasnt’ too long before we were freezing cold again and we had to step into the nearest shop to get warm. And that happened to be an art gallery. It was modern art – sort of. Not modern art like a red splodge being sold for £1m, but more like popular fun art.

Some of it was cool – a stylised city view of new york city on a massive canvas, some of it was weird, a random sculpture of a hand holding a pint glass, and some of it was ridiculous, a sculpture of a woman sitting on four stones priced at £233,000.

But it was a break, a step outside of real life. And the youngest rad really loved it and wanted to see more, so we did 2 laps of the gallery.

Afterwards he asked me who would buy this stuff. I had no idea.

So it’s the first of December. The christmas season has arrived. Not the fake one that starts in September, but the real one where I get to open an advent calendar and eat a chocolate. The weather has changed too so it is suitable cold and crisp, with a nice layer of frost each morning.

And yet, this is not the topic I’m going to talk to you about. Because, as I was finishing my stream last night, Mrs Rad came in in a panic. “The water is off” and true enough it was. So rather than chill out and go to sleep, we were ringing the water board to find out what had happened. Answer – nothing. “It must be a problem in my building and the landlord can sort it out”. They don’t know my landlord.

Mrs Rad run the landlords ’emergency number’. In their definiton, emergency means lethargic, but they took our details and promised to call back. You can guess what didn’t happen next.

Anyway, in the meantime we realised we would need some water and the 24-hour supermarket, which it turns out, closes at midnight, was still open for a few minutes. I wrapped myself up in 5-10 layers of clothing and ventured outside to ride my nbike there. To be fair the advantage of the electric bike really kicked in.

I was bleary eyed and sleepy, but the shop seemed to be full of people. Obviously everyone must just shop in the middle of the night around here. You have to compete with the shelf stackers in certain areas, but I grabbed 2 bottles of water quickly and left. Also adding a pack of chocolates to the basket, as a payment for my good deed.

We also left the dehumidifier on overnight so that we would have water to flush toilets etc.

And we went to sleep. When we woke up there was no further message from that landlord, and the water was still not working, and we had to make preparation for what we would do if it continued. Go to parents? Night in a Five Star hotel? Live in the cinema?

But then, just like that, it was fixed. Fuse had tripped on the water pump for the building. The first person there just reset the switch and all was fine.

Just like that.